E-commerce – the land where milk and honey flows? In January 2020, no one would have imagined how this year would challenge us as globalized and interconnected world.  How different this year would be and how fast we as human beings would have to adapt to new situations. Curfews, social distancing, home office, empty shelves in…

Does the depiction of the carbon dioxide emission influence our consumer behaviour? Before we can ask ourselves the question if carbon dioxide (CO2) influences our consumer behaviour, we first have to dive deeper into the potential effect of CO2 to our planet. When talking about our planet, the climate change or sustainability CO2 emissions are discussed most….

Leveraging the potential of smart food safety Recent technological advances in Digitalization or the Internet of Things (IoT) are called to radically revolutionize the food industry. In this vein, there has been a growing interest in smart devices, digital twins, and artificial intelligence to be utilized in the automation process in food production.Up to this…

The (dis)informed society We are practically on the way from the age of information to the age of disinformation. The importance of experts is getting lost in view of the wide range of experiences available online. In 1966, Karl Steinbuch, a pioneer of digitization, drew a picture of society that will promote ubiquitous information and…

Digital Transformation – Disrupt or be Disrupted! With the title “Digital is everything. Understand your customer. Win or learn”, Manuel Nappo opened the digital food business week 2021. What will the future look like? This question and the following cover of “The New Yorker” magazine unleashed the first discussion. Will the robots have taken over…

Where the binary code meets the code of life Doubling the variables As we all know, the binary code has two variables – 0 and 1. With these variables functions the whole digital universe. Now, what would happen if these two numbers are suddenly doubled? A more complex system with now four variables arises. The…

Sustainable tomatoes from the greenhouse – Is this possible? Should I rather buy tomatoes from Spain or the Swiss tomatoes from the greenhouse? Which tomatoes are more environmentally friendly? These and similar questions I have asked myself very often and I am sure many of you feel very similar. The “label jungle” in the supermarket…

Time to Harmonize Algorithms with Human Intuition From the lecture by Peter Kauf, who is a mathematician and CEO of Prognosix, we learned how algorithms can be used in the predictive analysis and how humans can draw better outcomes from judgment by algorithms. Image source: By Stephen Milborrow – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14143467…

Do you remember the horse meat in beef products? That was food fraud. Food fraud is growing and will be one of the biggest problems in the future in the food sector. For example, up to 87% red snapper (fish) is mislabeled. Food supply chains are becoming more global, therefore it gets more difficult to…

Let’s be real, we all went to a store in our lives at some point with one simple goal in mind: Get in, get your stuff and get out. No personal interaction, no waiting, no trivial aspects to stop us in our stride. We live in a busy world, a fast world. While the elderly…